 Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's Rick session on the National Institute of Standards and Technology Test Reactor Event, the response, review, and status. My name is Jeremy Bowen. I'm the Deputy Director for the Division of Advanced Reactors and Non-Power Production and Utilization Facilities in the NRC's Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, and I'll be chairing this afternoon's session. On February 3rd, 2021, an event occurred at the NIST Center for Neutron Research in which a safety limit was exceeded and nuclear fuel was damaged. The facility itself was designed for the possibility of such an event and all safety systems functioned as intended. As a result, there was no impact to the public or to the environment. Despite this lack of impact, the event itself was a significant event for the NIST facility, research and test reactor community, and the nuclear industry as a whole. The objective for this afternoon's session is to provide an overview of the event to outline the actions taken by the NRC over the past year to review and assess the licensee's response and to provide information on the latest status. So we have a panel of three experts with us this afternoon to walk us through the discussion. First, we'll hear from Tom Newton, the deputy director of the NIST Center for Neutron Research. He'll provide a presentation on the event itself and an update on the status of the facility. Following Tom, we have Travis Tate, the chief of the NRC's non-power production and utilization facilities oversight branch, and Travis will outline the agency's response to the event and our increased oversight of the facility itself for the past year. Finally, Josh Borromeo, the chief of the NRC's non-power production and utilization facility licensing branch, will provide an overview of the NRC's ongoing technical evaluation of the facility and our assessment of NIST's plans for eventual restart. Before we begin, I'd like to point out that the NRC remains focused on the safety of the NIST reactor. The reactor itself remains shut down and the NRC's review of the event and the activities following are ongoing. NRC approval is required to restart the facility and no decision on a timeline for authorization has been made at this time. Travis and Josh will provide more details in their presentations. As we go through the discussion, we'd appreciate you providing any questions through the chat function and we look forward to an opportunity to address those at the end of the presentations. So I'd like to thank all of our presenters for being with us again today and a special thank you to our session coordinator Andrew Wall. With that, I will go ahead and get started and I'll introduce our first speaker. So Thomas Newton. Thomas Newton is the deputy director for the NIST Center for Neutron Research and the chief of reactor operations and engineering. Tom has held these positions since August 2015 and prior to coming to NIST, Tom was the director and reactor operations for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Research Reactor. Tom earned a PhD in nuclear science and engineering from MIT in 2006 and he holds bachelor's and master's degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of Arkansas. He is the author or co-author of over 60 publications on research reactor design and operations, experiment design, and reactor utilization. Tom, thank you again for joining us. I'll turn it over to you, sir. Thank you, Jeremy. First thing I'm going to do is talk about the design of the reactor and the fuel in the reactor, then go over the event in a bit of detail and talk about root causes and corrective actions. So if you go to the next slide please. This is the overview of the MCNR and the Center for Neutron Research. We are one of three major neutron science centers in the United States, the other two being Oak Ridge National Laboratory. We have, as shown in the picture here, we have 30 neutron instruments that are used for a variety of science applications and we host over 3,000 participants every year at MCNR in a typical year. So there's a very high demand for our instruments that are oversubscribed by a factor of two or more. The neutrons, of course, are supplied by the reactor, a 20 megawatt research test reactor. The reactor operates on a 38-day fuel cycle. So next slide, I'll show you a bit about the reactor itself. This is a cutaway view of the reactor. We have 30 fuel elements in the reactor and the fuel is actually have a split core and upper and lower fuel sections with the gap in the metal that's a flux trap. The flux trap in the metal, of course, is a peak where thermal neutrons are and so all of our beam tubes and our cold neutron sources are pointed to that flux trap for a peak of neutrons. The reactor is a heavy water reactor. Heavy water moderated, cooled and reflected. You can see that we have a lower plenum below the reactor there that circulates heavy water through the core at about 9,000 gallons a minute. The reactor is controlled by four shim arms made of cadmium. These shim arms are run in a semaphore shape. You can see kind of one toward the middle there. There's a as a rotational shaft right outside the core that moves those shim arms. And the fuel elements, the 30 fuel elements are inserted into the lower grid. There's an upper and lower grid that holds the elements together and the elements are fitted into the bottom grid plate with the nozzle. The nozzle accepts the heavy water flow through the fuel element and then of course it slashes the top grid plate and I'll go through that in some detail. Next slide. Okay, the fuel is HEU fuel. Our fuel meat is uranium oxide U308 with aluminum dispersant. We also have aluminum cladding on the outside so plate type fuel. If you see the diagram over there on the right, we have 17 fuel plates inside the element. Actually, if you do upper and lower fuel section, there's a total of 34 fuel plates in a fuel element. The outer plates are not fueled. So total loading in a fuel element is about 350 grams of uranium. When we do a refueling, which is every 38 days where we go through a 38 day fuel cycle, we put in four new fuel elements at the time and then discharge four. And the four that are discharged have been in for either seven or eight cycles. Typically that's about a year through the core before they are discharged. Next slide please. Okay, refueling because it's heavy water. You can't mix heavy water and air because of two reasons you degrade the heavy water and second you get trading exposure to the folks doing the refueling. And so all the refueling is done by feel only. You're not able to see what you're doing. So we have a unique mechanism by which we refuel the reactor. We have each fuel position, each of the 30 fuel positions has a transfer tool above it that will raise and lower the element in place. And so you see the middle picture there is a mock-up of the refueling tool that's on top of the fuel element head. Once the element is moved up and it's moved to transfer arms to transfer it to different locations around the reactor, then lowered by the tool above that position and put into place and then latched. And the picture over on the right shows a mock-up of a latch right below that sign there. You can see there's a latch bar that's rotated out and that latch bar once it's rotated out latches into slot underneath the upper grid plate of the reactor. The reason I'm kind of going through this in detail is because latching was a key contributor to the event that happened, which I'm going to talk about now. So next slide. Okay, this is a synopsis of what happened on February 3rd. We started a normal startup at about 9 a.m. and got to 10 megawatts and leveled off there for a bit. At 9.06, we began an ascension to full power. Before we got to full power, we had a sudden drop to about 7 megawatts or so, followed very shortly thereafter by a release of fission products. These fission products made it to the stack less than a minute later and tripped the stack radiation monitor, which the trip point was 50,000 counts per minute, which did a major scram. What we mean by a major scram is it only scram the reactor, shut the reactor down, and also seal the confinement building to limit release. At 9.16, we declared an alert, and I'll talk a bit more about why we did that in a minute. We evacuated the control room shortly thereafter because of high radiation levels in the control room and notified the NRC at 9.29. Next slide, please. Okay, this is a graph of the events. This is taken off a program we call Reactors to Desktop, which is a program that samples data. It doesn't show all the data points, but at least it's fairly good for showing and trending. And so I'm going to orient you here a little bit on this slide here. The green line is the shim arm position. The black line is the reactor power is indicated by a nuclear instrument channel. The red line is radiation monitor in the stack, and the blue line is radiation monitor in the fission sweep gas system. We have a radiation monitor. That's the first thing that indicates fission products when it comes out of the reactor. So you can see we leveled off a little earlier at one megawatt with very little indication of any issues. Then we raised power to 10 megawatts, and you can see that happens, and there's a bit of a jagged line there due to oscillations. We think after the fact that was due to nucleic boiling in this unlatched element, departure from nucleic boiling. This was also seen somewhat on the nuclear instruments in the control room, but it didn't rise to a threshold by which the operator would have taken action to shut the reactor down. Then we raised power as you can see in the black line, and once we started approaching the full power room, we saw a sudden drop there. And right after that sudden drop, you see a big increase in the fission product line or the blue line there. And then once that fission product gas is made it to the stack monitor, then you can see the red line goes up, followed, and you can see the scram there where the green line of the shimmering position is scrammed in the reactor. And once the confinement building is sealed, then you see the peak drops off quite precipitously because there's no more gas escaping the confinement building. So next slide, please. So as mentioned before, all the systems that operated like they're supposed to, in addition to that, all the operators and health physics staff responded as they were trained and did appropriate actions. As I mentioned before, the radiation levels in the control room necessitated evacuation right after the event happened. We had a couple of people that stayed behind, a couple of operators stayed behind to start shutdown activities. And later that day, we had another building entry to reentry to start to complete the shutdown activities. As a result of those activities, we had a total of 10 staff members that were contaminated. They were successfully contaminated that day and went home without incident. Total dose to the mech personnel during the event was well within NRC limits. As a matter of fact, the official dose was, I think, something like 1.1 rem. A lot of that was due to contamination of dose symmetry. During the event, we collected all the dosimeters together. This was a lesson learned we had that the contamination levels we think resulted in higher doses being the side of the people than they really exceeded. They really accepted, but we were conservative there. We wanted to attribute all the dose we saw there to the operators. The control room, just so you know, the control room is right outside the reactor top area. So it's a fairly typical and research reactor. So that's why the radiation levels rose so quickly in the control room. But that's taken care of in the safety analysis report that we actually account for that in emergency planning. Next slide, please. Okay, when we declare an alert, this is a copy of the emergency instructions for the criteria for declaring an alert. The initial criteria for an alert is the stack monitor, which is, there's RD-41 reaching 50,000 cal per minute, which it did. At that point then the operator would then go down to the action level criteria to whether or not to really actually declare an alert. At 222, when you have indication of fuel cladding failure, that was the blue line you saw in the graph of high-healing sweep activity being above 50,000 cal per minute. That's when the operator declared the alert. Now, the harder part is now going to 221 and actually figuring out what the doses of the boundary are and the effluent concentrations. And so I'll talk about that here next on the next slide. So as part of the emergency instructions are to go out and take samples not only at the stack, but also at the site boundary downwind. And so that was done. And at that point, you know, these samples are brought back to the health physics staff to then ascertain what the activity levels are. We did several samples at the site boundary and several samples at the stack. None of the samples showed any iodines, radioiodines they stayed in the primary coolant system primarily. So very small, almost unquantifiable amounts of xenon and zezium at the site boundary. But we saw a lot more, of course, in the stack. You have a lot better data there. So because of those low high uncertainties in the stack and the site boundary measurements, we decided to go ahead and use the stack monitors of the stack counts to determine what the levels were. It took us a little time to do that. And so by about mid-afternoon at 1532, we were able to downgrade the alert to a new notification of unusual event. And further analysis, we were able to determine and determinate the emergency at 1935 that evening. Further analysis after that confirmed that the boundary doses were well below 0.5 millarum. NRC and DOE both confirmed these independently. And so the doses, as was mentioned before, the boundary doses were negligible. Next slide, please. So it took us a couple of weeks to get a camera in to see what had caused the issue. But we saw that there was an element, as you saw in the picture here, that was dislodge. We did a review of all the activities that had happened prior to the event. There was a refueling done on January 4. We reviewed the video of the personnel doing those procedures then. They did do the latching and latch checks, but when we reviewed them and indicated we found that the latch checks were not done correctly and may have, in fact, unlatched the element. After the refueling January 4, we delayed startup for about a month because of COVID concerns. So we decided to wait until start up the reactor until February. Because of that, and we started to stop primary pumps roughly daily after that because we wanted to keep the primary system cool and the secondary system warm. And the speculation, and this is, of course, speculation only, is that we pushed this element out from the flow area there. You see the bottom circle there. The nozzle of the element is actually resting on the lower grid plate, which did not allow it to have any flow. This element, by the way, was, had been in the reactor for one full cycle before without incident. We also reviewed QA documents and things and found there were no manufacturing or infection issues either. So it was a normal element. Okay. So next slide, please. After review of that, and we also indicated that the fuel elements had sustained some considerable damage, we made the conclusion that that fuel element had exceeded the fuel safety limit of 450 degrees Celsius. And we made a report on March 5 to NRC indicating that. And as mentioned before, the part of that is that we cannot resume operation until NRC agrees that we can do so. And you'll hear more about that from the NRC folks, but I'll talk about that here in a bit, too. The next slide, please. The first thing that we did after that was to instigate through a root cause investigation, an internal one with the technical working group, to find out what the root causes for this were, took us a couple of months to go through this in quite a bit of detail. And we found that there were several inadequacies we'd identified throughout the process. We had inadequacies in training and inadequacies in the procedures and the fuel action process itself. We had inadequate procedure compliance of the folks doing the refueling, and we had inadequate management oversight of the refueling process. We also continued to investigate after this report was done, and we made another finding that it's possible that if you lower the fuel handling tool onto the element with a bit of force, you could inadvertently unlatch a fuel element. And that's important because one of the things we had done as part of latching checks was what we call a height check. So you lower the tool on top of the fuel overhead and check the height to see if that is actually the fuel element's latched or not. And so inadvertently you could unlatch an element while you're checking to see if it's latched. And so that was an important finding there and things we've corrected since then. Next slide, please. The second root cause investigation was our reactor oversight committee, the safety evaluation committee. They formed a committee right after the technical working group had finished to look at root causes and also investigate the response and come up with proposed corrective action. So this was both internal and external to NCNR. They completed their report in August and they found that there were two additional root causes that led to the event. One was a lack of change management program and the other was a culture of complacency in the reactor operations group. They came up with 24 recommended corrective actions, all of which we've agreed to do, and I'll go through those in some kind of high-level detail next. So next slide, please. First of all, management corrective actions. Change management has been a big focus. We're doing program improvements top to bottom to address these. We have a new aging reactor management program in place that track changes and keeps track of all the change management things we're doing. We're also doing a fundamental organizational realignment, including addition of a fifth shift. We have four shifts right now we're adding a shift dedicated for training and for procedure compliance. We're overhauling all of the procedures. I'll talk about that in a minute. And we're also synthesizing all the existing change management programs we have now with ECNs or engineering change notices, trouble tickets, which are when things are broken, and a corrective action program. All of those are going to be synthesized as part of this program. In addition, we're doing systems for skills management. In addition to the fifth shift, we're doing operator incentives to incentivize operators for safety improvements and higher to permanent CRO, which I'm happy to say was done several months ago. Next slide. The other thing we're looking at in management is assessment of the tools we use for refueling, not only the refueling tools themselves. There's a picture here of the index plate. The index plate is a plate we put on top of the reactor to position the fuel. And the dimensional measurements are done here to verify there's complete fidelity in the refueling index plate. We are also setting standards for supervisors, for qualifying supervisors, and also making sure that their supervisor oversight is adequate by training them. We're instituting a continuous improvement program for, particularly for staff ownership of corrective actions, not only for this event, but going forward. We have several teams of folks that are involved in this, so actually all of the reactor operations group, all of the reactor engineering group, all the health physics and all of safety, industrial safety, are focused on these corrective actions and recovery tasks. We are integrating safety culture throughout our entire process, and we're benchmarking ourselves not only with U.S. facilities but international facilities as well to find out what good it looks like and get there. Next slide, please. In addition to management, we're a corrective actions and training program. We are requiring proficiency training for every operator that moves fuel. That includes setting qualification standards for fuel movements and documenting those prior to folks being able to move fuel. We are also rewriting the training programs for better knowledge transfer. We previously had sort of an apprenticeship program, which was not that great for knowledge transfer. Now we're making sure the expectations are clearly spelled out in all the training program. Developing standards for supervisors for how they train folks and periodic management reviews of the training program itself. Next slide. We are also revamping all of our 500-plus procedures to upgrade them to make sure safety is integrated into the procedures and also revising them to meet INPO 11003 standards, which are nuclear power plant standards for procedures. Refueling procedures themselves are being rewritten to capture details. It used to be when we did a refueling procedures like move the element from A to B, and now it's much more detail about every single movement that has to be made for the fuel, how you move it, and how you latch it. There's a picture over in the right of a reader worker program we've instituted so that there's a person outside reading the procedure, the folks inside doing the actual movements will repeat back to the reader saying, okay, this is what I understand I'm going to do, and this is what I'm going to do, and then once it's verified back to the reader, then he documents that was done and moves on to the next step. So that's integrated now in our procedures. Additional training, changes in the refueling procedures as latch checks are going to be done prior to the final pump restart, and we're done at rotation check. Once we do that rotation and get that latch in place, we're going to have a fiduciary mark in place that verifies that that's indeed in a latch position and then redundantly checked by a second individual. In addition to that, we are instituting new procedures for visual check. We're going to be lowering a camera into the reactor after all the latching has been done. Do a visual check to make sure I'll go over across every single fuel element position to verify it's in place, download those images, and then analyze those images by two redundant folks also to make sure that latches are set in place and you're not allowed to touch the fuel anymore after that, so you know that the latches are in place and you're not going to move. Next slide, please. This is a picture of the refueling camera we're going to be putting in the reactor. We've tested that, tested that, done quite well. We're finishing up the procedures now to actually do this visual check and that's going to be implemented and put in place probably the next couple of weeks or so. We are making sure that latch checks certify adequacy and making sure the elements are latched. As I mentioned, we're modifying the index plate with fiduciary remarks and dimensional analysis to make sure that they're set in place correctly. We're no longer going to be doing the height checks. As I mentioned, there's some problems there with that. The other two are completely adequate to make sure we're latched. We're modifying a training test stand. This is a test stand we used to train the reactor operation how to move fuel without a latch fill, so that's going to be fixed up. In addition to that, another thing we're putting in place is a noise gate for the nuclear instruments. Before it was pretty subjective as to whether or not the signal is something you should take action on or not. Now we're going to take the subjectivity out of all that and make sure that the noise gate will analyze that signal and then alert the operator if it attacks the signal is not as abnormal in any way. Next slide please. Just one more slide about our interactions with NRC and you're going to hear more about this here from Josh and Travis. We have a special inspection team that began on February 8th right after the event. The inspectors have been present either virtually or physically for pretty much daily ever since then, particularly for special evolutions. Written reports are written in green here. We at February 16th was the first written report on the event. Mark V was the, as I mentioned before, the conclusion that we exceeded the safety limit. Mark May 13th was a report on inadequacies from the root cause investigation. In July, we have started bi-weekly phone calls with the NRC management. Those have since changed to weekly. So, as a matter of fact, we met this morning and we meet every Wednesday. And then October 1st, we submitted a report to NRC on the root causes, our planned corrective actions, and a request for permission to restart on the condition that we complete the corrective actions. October, since then, we've been going back and forth with NRC with supplemental information and furnished for their audit process, which you'll hear about. And one thing I didn't put in here is we have a license amendment request we submitted in December that basically codifies the new latch check procedures that requires that not only do rotational but also visual checks after you touch the field. So, all that's going to be put in place and solidified so that we can't change it. Next slide, please. The status of the reactor. Let's see once we, I think we have one more slide. A status of the reactor, all but three field elements have been removed from the core, including the damaged field element. There's a picture there of getting ready to move the field element in August that we did last year. So, all but three have been moved. The three were left in place to make sure that no debris fell below the little grid plate. So, those are, since the vessel cleanup has been completed now, those elements are going to be removed probably within a week or so. And then we will start the cleanup process. Next slide. The next step in our cleanup procedure is going to be a primary cleanup of the PTO primary system. There's a, this is a gamma scan we took of the primary system early on to look for hot spots where the problems might fly in the primary system. So, the next thing we're going to do after we get everything out of the reactor is put in filter elements. Instead of 30 fuel elements, we're going to put in 30 filter elements. And then we'll start up the primary pumps to basically flush out these debris and get them caught up into the filters. That may require a little bit of agitation, but we're prepared for that. So, we'll see how that goes. And parallel to that, we're going to be looking at all the elements that were in the core to see if they're okay to be reused. We're going to be doing a backflow. So, we're going to be flowing reverse through the top of the element down to the bottom to flush out the debris that might be present. And then do a visual inspection of all the element channels and then certify them for reuse. And that should happen hopefully the next month or so. So, next slide. This is my last slide on conclusions. A February 3rd event was an unprecedented event for research reactors. And we recognize that NIST has committed to restart the reactor when all necessary corrective actions are done and not until then. And when NRC allows and agrees that those necessary corrective actions have been completed. Shout out to NIST Public Affairs. They've been invaluable in helping communication throughout the whole time here. External reviews, I mentioned too here, but there are several other external reviews found no issues with the event response that was all done adequately. And the last thing I want to leave with is frequent and open communications. We think it's going to be the key to recover and restart. Okay, back to you, Jeremy. You're muted. Sorry, I just realized I was on mute. So, appreciate that, Tom. Thanks for the presentation. And thanks for everyone who's submitting questions so far. We'll get to get the questions for Tom here after the rest of the presentations. So, next we'll move over to Travis Tate. So, Travis is the Chief of the Non-Power Production and Utilization Facilities Oversight Branch in NRR's Division of Advanced Reactors and Non-Power Production Utilization Facilities. Travis joined the NRC in January 2001 as a licensing project manager and he's held numerous staff and management positions since then. Prior to joining the NRC, Travis was employed as a staff engineer with science applications international cooperation in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. While at Oak Ridge, he provided nuclear facility safety analysis, transportation package safety analysis, and nuclear criticality safety analysis support for the Department of Energy. Travis was a recipient of the NRC's Meritorious Service Award for Equal Employment Opportunity Excellence in 2012 and he is a graduate from the University of Tennessee Knoxville with a Bachelor's of Science in Nuclear Engineering. Hi, Travis. I will turn the presentation to you. Thanks, Jeremy. Good afternoon, everyone. My presentation today will discuss the NRC's oversight response to the February 3rd event that occurred at NIST. Before I get into, I'm sorry, next slide please. So, before I get into our response activities, I think it would be helpful to provide an overview of the non-power reactors regulated by the NRC. Research and test reactors may be classified by their moderator. Typically, typical moderators include water, heavy water, which is what NIST has, polyethylene, and graphite. The NRC has primarily licensed moderate water moderated reactors, which can be further classified as either pool type or tank type. Pool type reactors have a core immersed in an open pool of water. The pools typically have about 20 feet of water above the core to provide cooling and radiation shielding. At pool type reactors, the operator, the operating core, can be observed through the pool water. Tank type reactors have a core that is in a tank with water sealed at the top. Reactors may also be classified by the type of fuel used, such as plate type or trigger. Trigger fuel is unique in that a moderator's hydrogen is chemically bonded to the fuel. All NRC licensed research and test reactors have a built-in safety feature, which reduces reactor power during potential accidents before an unacceptable power level or temperature could be reached. Research and test reactors are typically licensed by the NRC according to the total thermal energy produced by the reactor. These facilities range in size from five watts to 20 megawatts thermal. In contrast, a typical commercial nuclear power reactor is rated at 3,000 megawatts thermal. Because of this large difference in power generated, the consequences of an accident at a research and test reactor is limited when compared to a commercial power reactor. For this reason, research and test, research reactors' emergency planning zones are often the boundary of the room in which the reactor is housed. Unlike power plants, research and test reactor control rooms are usually in the confinement or containment area where the reactor is located. Facility staff and personnel work in the reactor room or building during operation. Most research and test reactors are in rooms or buildings that have a dedicated ventilation system and all health systems that control the release of radiation. Because of the low power levels at which research and test reactors operates, they require no or minimum cooling for short periods after shutdown. In addition, many of these reactors operate on a very limited schedule. Next slide, please. So the regulatory functions for research and test reactors are performed by two branches in NRR. The licensed branch conducts licensing reviews, develops licensing guidance, and interfaces with outside organizations. Next slide, please. The oversight branch conducts activities such as safety and security inspections, operator licensing, develops inspection and operator license guidance, and coordinates enforcement activities and event response. Next slide, please. So the authority under which the NRC performs its regulatory functions for non-power reactors is provided by the Atomic Energy Act. The key principles within our authority is provided in bold text in this slide. This language in the Atomic Energy Act recognizes the vital research and development that non-power reactors provide the inherent low risk of these facilities, while also recognizing the importance of appropriate regulatory oversight to ensure the protection of public health and safety. Next slide, please. Additionally, the commission applies the principles of good regulation in executing our activities for non-power reactors. Next slide. So immediately following notification of the event, the NRC exercised response procedures to assess the conditions at the facility. The NRC remained in monitoring mode and maintained communications with NIST throughout the following days. The NRC staff conducted a reactive inspection evaluation and determined that a special inspection team would be established. A charter was issued and the special inspection team began on-site inspections on February 8. The team was chartered to evaluate the consequences of the event, the licensees' response to the event, the consequences of the event, the maintenance activities and outage actions related to fuel movement, the licensees' root cause determination, and the licensees' completed and planned corrective actions. On March 2, NIST reported that during the event, they violated TechSpec's technical specification 2.1 safety limit, which states the reactor fuel clouding temperature shall not exceed 842 degrees Fahrenheit or 450 degrees Celsius for any operating condition of power or flow. Following this notification, the NRC re-evaluated the reactive inspection decision and determined that additional resources and expertise would be added to the special inspection team, as well as we included additional regional input for independent insights into the special inspection. In a follow-up 14-day report, NIST indicated that evaluation of the root cause for the event would take several months in order to be responsive and provide timely information regarding our special inspection activities. The NRC issued an interim inspection report on April 14, 2021. Since February, following the event, the NRC special inspection team has maintained both on-site and remote inspection presence of the NIST event. NIST completed a root cause analysis and corrective actions report, and on October 1, NIST submitted a request to restart the reactor, and our response to that request will be covered by Josh in his presentation. The NRC has completed the special inspection activities in accordance with the charter and is preparing to issue the final inspection report, which will include any findings related to NRC requirements. Following the issuance of the final report, the NRC will also issue related enforcement actions deemed appropriate in accordance with our enforcement process and policy. We will discuss the results of the special inspection during a public exit meeting with NIST on March the 16. Next slide, please. So, a summary of our response determined that the reactor safety systems functioned properly during the event and that public health and safety were protected during and following the event. The NRC is satisfied that the surrounding community remains safe while the reactor remains shut down. The reactor has remained in a stable shutdown condition and monitoring systems are operating properly. As stated previously, NIST has completed a root cause analysis and provided responsive corrective actions. Josh will discuss the request for authorization to restart the reactor in his presentation and the special inspection will which the special inspection will inform the NRC's response to the restart request. Next slide, please. Although our special inspection objectives have been accomplished, it is important to note that we have a significant number of additional inspections to conduct. We are currently developing our plan for inspection activities necessary to support the restart decision as well as any future inspections to ensure corrective actions can be sustained should the reactor receive authorization to restart. Thank you. I'll be happy to answer questions during the Q&A period and I'll turn it back over to Jeremy. All right, Travis. Thanks very much. Finally, we'll hear from Josh Bormel. Josh is the chief of the non-power production and utilization facility licensing branch in NRR's division of advanced reactors and non-power production utilization facilities. Josh joined the NRC in 2015 as a reactor systems engineer in the office of nuclear reactor regulation and he has worked on a number of complex projects including the new scale design certification application and accident tolerant fuel. Prior to joining the NRC, Josh worked at Westinghouse as a safety analysis engineer focusing on loss of quant accident analyses and methodology development. Josh received his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Penn State. Josh, floor is all yours. Great. Thanks Jeremy. So as Jeremy said, I'm Josh Bormel, chief of the NPUFF licensing branch in NRR and my branch is responsible for all the licensing aspects of NPUFF's including the NIST test reactor and I think Travis did a good job of explaining what my branch does. With respect to the NIST restart request, we're not only responsible for the licensing aspects with respect to that but also its overall coordination of the restart request effort. So today, I'm going to be talking about NRR's approach to considering the NIST restart request and there's a few key takeaways that I hope you get from my presentation today. The first is I hope you come away with an understanding that this is an agency-wide effort and an understanding what the NRC is considering for a restart decision. The second is a high level understanding of the process that we're using to support the restart decision and the third and probably the most important thing I think you heard from Travis, I think you also heard it from Jeremy was that the NRC is not going to make a decision on restart until we have reasonable assurance that this event or similar event will not happen again at NIST. So next slide please. Okay, so I think Tom did a really good job of providing an overview of the event but I'm going to provide a quick recap so it's fresh on your minds. So as the NIST test reactor was coming up to power, the reactor scrammed on high exhaust radiation levels and this was a result of an element becoming unleashed, that element becoming unseated and it was starved of coolant flow and the element was damaged and a safety limit was exceeded as a result and I'll talk a little bit more about safety limits here on the next slide and the reactor was shut down or remained shut down today. So there's a couple additional points I want to make regarding the event. So the first set is that there was radiation release during the event and that radiation release was bounded by the maximum hypothetical accident analyzed as part of the NIST licensing basis. Now a maximum hypothetical accident is a postulated accident that is intended to bound all credible accidents and is part of the regulatory framework for research and test reactors. I say this to point out that the event was not beyond what the systems at NIST were designed for and the second point I want to make which kind of deptails into the first one is while there was radiation released in the environment, the safety systems functioned properly and offsite doses were near background levels which are well below the regulatory limits and the NRC was satisfied or remained satisfied that public health and safety was protected and the surrounding community remained safe and continues to remain safe. Now I do want to reiterate that this was a various serious event and the NRC is taking this event very seriously and the NRC will not authorize restart until we have reasonable assurance that public health and safety will be protected. Next slide please. Okay so this slide provides an overview of the regulatory basis for why NRC authorization is needed to restart the reactor. First I'm going to touch on what a safety limit is and what the safety limit is for NIST. I think both Tom and Travis spoke to that a little bit but I'll reemphasize here. So in general safety limits are limits on variables that are necessary to protect the integrity of a physical barrier that guards against the uncontrolled release of radioactivity. For NIST the safety limit is a temperature limit that's put on the fuel cladding to ensure it can maintain its integrity to prevent the release of vision products. So during the NIST event the cladding temperature went above the safety limit and that fuel element was damaged and vision products were released. Now because of the importance of the safety limit if a safety limit is exceeded the NRC regulations will not allow operation of a reactor until authorized by the NRC and you can see that I listed the regulation here in the first sub-bullet. Also I want to point out that the NIST license the NIST text specs require NRC authorization to resume operations if a safety limit is violated and that's in the second sub-bullet here in my slide. So the key takeaway here is that the NRC's regulatory framework requires NRC authorization to resume operations if these important safety limits are exceeded. Next slide please. Okay so since NRC approval is required for restart I wanted to highlight the documents submitted to the NRC to support that decision. So so far we've seen two documents the request to restart reactor from NIST right and this request contained an evaluation of the event the root cause the root cause is identified by NIST and the NIST initiated corrective actions. We also have the license amendment request that requests a change to the text back to bolster the requirements to ensure that a few elements latched and Tom touched on this in his slides a little bit. So the NRC staff has accepted both documents right and they are currently under NRC review. The staff has performed a number of audits to gain a better understanding of the technical material in these submittals. In addition to these documents I do want to highlight that the SIT reviewed many more documents to support the inspection report and that inspection report is planned to be issued in the next couple of weeks. Next slide please. Okay so we touched on what NIST submitted now I'm going to discuss what the NRC is looking for to support the restart decision and I there are three key areas that the NRC will base its decision on and I'm going to read these because I think they're very important. So the first is ensuring that the event and the reasons it occurred are fully understood. So that's you know having a robust root cause analysis that the NRC staff agrees with. The next is confirming that NIST has adequately identified and addressed the impacts to the test reactor. So one of the for example one of the areas that we're looking at is the other fuel elements that were in the core whenever the event happened and evaluating if those can be reused during the restart. And the third is ensuring that NIST has made corrections to prevent this event and similar types of events from happening again and this is ensuring that NIST has taken the appropriate corrective actions to ensure that this event will not happen again. Now this decision is not only with the licensing actions related to the submittals from NIST and you're going to see some more detail on that in the coming slides but it's a coordinated effort across many areas of the NRC including inspections and enforcement actions. Now I'm going to reinforce that the NRC is moving efficiently to try to move through this review but we won't make a restart decision until we've determined that the restart will be protective of public health and safety. Next slide please. Okay this slide provides an overview of the key areas of consideration for the restart decision. Now these areas are not only vital to ensure that we make a sound regulatory decision on a very complex and significant event but also to ensure that we're communicating appropriately with our various internal and external stakeholders. Now each area has representatives on the the restart team and this team meets regularly to ensure that we're considering all the appropriate aspects for the restart decision and as well as staying aligned with all the activities that we have going on in parallel. Next slide please. Okay so this slide provides an overview of the process the NRC is using for the restart decision and a couple things I want to point out first here there are three major sub-processes that the support the restart decision you can see these listed on the left hand side licensing inspection and enforcement actions and this figure contains the major actions for each one of these areas. The other thing I want to highlight is this gray trapezoid at the very top of the of the figure here that has the arrows to the left and the right that indicates the reactor a restarted reactor and you can see the restart decision comes just before just before the restart of the reactor and the last thing I want to point out on this is that the the x-axis on this is time but it's not to scale and these actions may shift in order relative to one another this is just a tool that we're using to describe the high high level in general approach to the to the restart decision. Now some additional items on this you can look at the restart decision process of made up of these sub-processes interacting with one another and the NRC is closely coordinating all these efforts to ensure that we don't have any gaps or significant overlap between between all of these efforts and you can also see how how each of these areas will feed into the restart decision and it's not only in the licensing world to to make the decision on the restart. Also for each one of these sub-processes the NRC is using already established processes to accept practical and lieu of developing new processes just for just for the the restart effort. And the last point that I do want to highlight here and Travis touched on it but for the oversight and inspection activities in the blue here those activities will continue following the restart of the reactor to ensure that performance levels at NIST remain at acceptable levels. So one last thing on this slide before we move on I do want to touch on where we're at in in this process. So with respect to the licensing review NIST has submitted the restart request as well as the root cause root causes and corrective actions the NRC staff is currently completing its technical review and documents technical evaluation report like I said before we're performing audits and we're and we're starting the documentation of that report. With respect to the inspection activities we are the special inspection team has drafted its special inspection report and as I mentioned before that's due out and then that's due to be released to the public in the near future and we also have a public exit meeting scheduled for March 16th. And with respect to enforcement actions we have begun the enforcement process and and we're you know we're just in that first box there so that's where we are as far as the overall with respect to the overall restart decision process. Next slide please. Okay so on this last slide I wanted to highlight some of the key documents that the NRC will be producing to support the decision. So we're producing NRC inspection reports as well NRC inspection reports and we've already released an interim special inspection team report and the final is due soon. With respect to the licensing actions the staff is developing a technical evaluation report that will document the design and the licensing basis impacts of the event and like I said before the staff is currently drafting that now and it's going to incorporate results from the license amendment request that we are currently reviewing as well as some as well as potentially some input from inspection reports and then we'll be producing documents relative to the outcomes of any enforcement actions that we have. So that's all I have on my presentation material today and I and I hope this overview helped you understand the steps the NRC is taking to come to a restart decision and the final thing I'll leave you with before I turn it over to Jeremy is that the NRC is not going to make a decision on restart until we've determined that the restart will be protective of public health and safety. Thank you. All right thanks Josh so I appreciate again all the presentations and all the questions that have come in so we have about 30 minutes left in the session several questions have come in I'm going to try and combine a few so they're kind of similar so so so that we're able to get to most of the topics that have been brought up several questions for Tom so we'll start there with him and then a couple for the staff and the NRC staff and we'll go from there. So Tom the first one there was there are several questions about the release and I wondered if you wanted to elaborate on that a little bit more multiple questions about whether there was any indication of tritium release so I guess we'll start there. Okay keep in mind that there was no loss of coolant here so tritium releases were normal there were there was no release of tritium during the event above and beyond what we normally release as a part of routine operations. Are there specifics on releases? No that was it it just you know there were questions about elaboration so the and then the only specific was about the tritium so I just wanted to give you that opportunity to provide that clarity. The probably the first grouping of questions I'll have here relates to the design basis accident for the for the NIST facility so again trying to combine a few here so is there a design basis accident scenario for the reactor as there would be for a commercial reactor if so how did this incident compare to what was considered in the design and the licensing of the facility? Yeah with research reactors it's the design basis is actually what's called a maximum hypothetical accident and our MHA is melting of a maximum activity fuel a complete melting of a maximum fuel maximum activity fuel element and if you compare the doses to an MHA to what happened here we are about two orders of magnitude or maybe even more below the MHA so we're well bounded by that. See one more question for you Tom and then we'll we'll give you a break and I go to a couple further NRC staff let's see can you elaborate on the fuel latching process are the latch checks redundant or the individual or visual inspections considered before the February 2021 event and have you considered any modifications to the latching mechanism or the process? Okay I'll see if I can get all those in one shot they'll probably have to help me so latching mechanism prior to the event was a redundant a single redundant check of rotation using that a height check was sort of a a check but not a real not didn't meet the tech spec requirement the rotation check was the was the was the official check and that was a single redundant check and again as I mentioned that was done incorrectly before so it contributes to the event there now I've already lost the rest of the questions let's see oh modifications we have looked pretty hard at modifying the the mechanism by which we latch things we're still looking at that but we don't want to start to you know get to a point where we have unintended consequences and we've messed something else up by modifying it so we're looking at that pretty hard but one thing to point out is that we have these new new corrective actions we have once we put the put the latch in place and visually verify it then there's no no mechanism by which it will unlatch itself or any mechanism incredible mechanism by which the fuel element could be on on latch so once the visual check is in place that's the be all in though there's no possible way for an element to become unlatched after that yeah on the can I jump in on that response to certainly yeah so I mean the energy staff is currently reviewing a license of member request that speaks directly to the the the latching right so we're we're currently reviewing the changes to this to the tech specs but we're also auto auditing the underlying procedures that are going to support those tech specs so we're we're currently reviewing that right and and that that's definitely going to be an important change to support our restart decision thanks josh all right uh tom will give you a we'll give you a break come back to you in a in a minute but no so travis question about minimum regulation so i want to folks want you to elaborate a little bit on the minimum regulation principle for non-power reactors okay thanks so minimum regulation in practice i think the the thing to highlight is that that principle comes from the atomic energy act what i said about minimum regulation is um there are instances throughout the uh the regulations that do not apply to research reactors only that are things that are applicable to power reactors so basically the the minimum regulation in practice i think is consistent with where the agency is right now and and i think you've heard a lot if you've been participating in the rick about the the risk smart concept that we apply in the in the agency and i would say in practice minimum regulations just say that the practice of being risk smart and in the application of our regulation which recognizes the the risk associated with the non-power reactors the low risk in comparison to power reactors so that's what the atomic energy act is is really get into and i think the key part to to remember in that is the act does give us the nrc the agency the authority to apply appropriate amount of regulation to ensure the public health and safety so that's a piece that's also a part of it so it doesn't preclude public health and safety by applying that principle of minimum regulation okay thanks Travis i think well said josh anything you'd like to add or or elaborate on maybe maybe i'll uh provide an example of what i when i think of minimum regulation so um for research and test reactors in in renewal space um if a reactor is above uh two megawatts right we'll provide a higher level of scrutiny for that if it's below two megawatts we'll uh we'll do a much more streamlined review right so you know i i agree with everything that travis said right there's certain regulations that do not apply to to research and test reactors but also how we treat um uh the relative risk uh in review space for each one of these uh reactors also place into minimum regulation okay thanks thanks josh i appreciate that and tom i'll come back to you a couple questions about uh culture you mentioned uh you know some of the root cause assessments and the findings there so um i guess probably um the question that summarizes a lot of the the question as well was um what cultural assessment tool did you use in your corrective actions and what was them more the most significant conclusions and um you know there's a couple questions about any of the reports being available I assume that might be from some of your your colleagues potentially interested in learning from some operational experience sure uh so uh we're basing all our safety culture on info 12012 the traits of a new healthy nuclear safety culture uh we just recently finished a safety culture survey of the staff here uh to basically see how things are going we've this is a baseline of course you've got to do it over time to see if things have changed but uh messages from that as we we've we've made some progress we're we've we see some some good good folks in terms of their questioning attitude and and the way they they look at things and are able to communicate up the chain if they see some issues we have some communications issues we still need to work through but we're certainly making progress and I think we've made a we didn't get a culture assessment right away but uh we think we've made quite a bit of progress now in that um one of the big uh contributing factors to the event was experience and and the loss of experience folks and in and as I mentioned before inadequacy in training of folks to to make sure they can do this right so uh that's all part of our cultural shift to to better train to better have better procedures and better better compliance of this procedures uh oh uh in terms of publicly available a lot of the stuff we've submitted in our C already which will be publicly available I think the reports themselves are not publicly available yet but I'll I'll talk to the public affairs folks as to see how publicly how publicly available they want to be and if anybody uh needs an individual copy just reach out to me and I can I can get it to you thanks Tom and Travis or Josh maybe you all want to touch on some of the information that we received and kind of presentations that we provided I know Travis you were just presenting to an ANS conference I believe a month or two ago so I think there's a you know good across the entire nuclear industry there's a always a desire to kind of share operational experience so um Travis or Josh either we want to elaborate on that so I would say one of the things that the you mentioned the ANS conference uh the that workshop or a panel for that presentation also included a presentation by DOE related to the the hyfer event that that happened and so that was a good opportunity to kind of share information and NIST spoke on on their activities and in the event itself and it was a good opportunity just to share across the the community similar type events and and learn from what each um each facility involved and and the response from both the operators and the regulator in each of those situations so I think that was a good opportunity as well okay okay thanks Travis so maybe we'll go to back to you Travis kind of time to the the last question to Tom about um culture there is a question for the NRC staff uh since contributing factors to the event included safety culture procedural use and adherence management oversight is the NRC considering any changes to the NRC's oversight and inspection program more generically across the U.S. testing reactor sector so I I think it's just important to point out that that the contributing factors that were discussed were you know provided by NIST and and those things are still under evaluation by the staff and so we want to complete and and have a full evaluation by the staff to assess you know any any of our programs or or anything that we could have done I I think we continuously do that we continuously as an agency assess our programs identify ways to get better and and our plan would be to do as we as we currently do as an agency you know once we get through uh our total assessment of of NIST and and what happened we'll go back and take a look at our programs to see if there's any areas that we need to consider in our oversight thanks Travis uh Tom a couple questions about um you know similar to the questions about the either reports and availability reports uh there's interested in seeing either um pictures or infographics or or stuff like that of the damaged fuel um anything that you all are able to that's that's out there in the public or that you're able to share I think um you know word uh we might actually have some of that information that's in the NRC's public documents I quite honestly I can't recall off the top of my head right now what is public or not but um any anything you're able to any information you're able to provide on that well we've certainly shared those with NRC uh I need to talk to the public affair folks here as to what they've how they want to communicate this and stuff it's not not secret or anything the field was heavily damaged so I think we could probably work a mechanism by which people could see that yeah and I'll and Josh and Travis that's something maybe we'll have to go back and take a closer look at I think some of the material we have certainly has some uh if nothing else in infographics and some shots of the of the damaged fuel um we'll have to confirm that that's available in the public forum for us right now so we can we can actually take that back let's see I'm just checking to see if there's some other questions I think we've gotten through most of the topics so Jeremy if you want me to touch on I didn't get off my mute button fast enough to come in after Travis about the other presentation that we've been doing right but I you know we've been presenting internally externally right about uh to the best of as much as we can about the process that we're using right how we're coordinating our efforts right you know in my mind I'm thinking the next phase is like you know okay we'll be able we've gathered a lot of the information and I think in the very near future we'll be able to uh provide some uh more concrete milestones right actions right for the NRC staff to uh to to hit and this to hit to help support our restart decision okay yeah thanks Josh and um kind of a good um more of a comment than in the questions but um the relating to the minimum regulations and the the connection of the safety limits between the two so um you know Josh this might actually do a good thing for you to elaborate on as the licensing branch chief so the connection the Travis was talking earlier about um you know the minimum regulation aspect and the fact that is as part of the licensing of uh RTRs that you know we look at establishing the safety limits and and the event and how this this event was probably bounded by the design of the facility itself so right so so you know safety limits right are required by NRC regulation right so 50 36 requires uh each licensee lesson or part 50 to have to have safety limits right and and I touched on this in this case it was a fuel temperature uh a cladding temperature limit uh was their safety limit um with respect to mha right the maximum hypothetical accident that I touched on as well new reg 1537 right is uh the overarching guidance for licensing a research and test reactor outlines what research and test reactor licensees need to include uh to to develop um these these maximum hypothetical accidents that bound you know credible accident sequences right so you know the 50 36 right is is requires the safety limit right but then I think if it's going like the next step next step down we have NRC guidance right to support uh what an appropriate maximum hypothetical accident analysis should be okay thanks josh so I just took us another quick scan through the questions I think we pretty much touched on every you know the question or the topics have come up so um give folks a one more chance if they've got another question um and while we're while we're waiting on that I do want to to go back and highlight Travis some mentions one thing that he mentioned in his presentation so we do have uh the the SIT inspection itself is complete and we're having a public exit with next next Wednesday on that that will be um at NRC headquarters and there will be a an option to to participate in that meeting virtually um so the the meeting itself is posted on our public meeting notification system on our the NRC's public website so encourage folks if if you are interested in hearing a little bit more about the findings from the inspection on and please tune into that meeting um and with that it doesn't look like we've had any other questions come in uh several several compliments and and and thanks from folks so uh echo my my appreciation to you all as well tom travis josh great information great uh great way to share the the operational experience with folks so um you know continue to do so this is uh not the first time we've talked about this in a public forum certainly we'll continue to do so going forward so thank you all again for for being here today with us thank you all in the audience for your questions and for your participation and with that we will close the session thank you